Notes

Thea 100
08/28
Critical Generosity:
• It is an idea outlined by contemporary theatre scholar, Jill Dolan.
• Differs from mainstream criticism.
• Seeks to understand performance in context.
• Honors individuals’ intentions, efforts, and impact.

Critical generosity asks that we ask:
• How does this production work?
• How does this production seem to reach its audience?
• How can we tell the audience was moved?
• How does this performance affect its larger community?

——————————————————————————————————————
08/30
Willing suspension of disbelief:
An agreement from the audience/reader/player to accept the constructed reality of the narrative, as long as that reality remains internally consistent.

“(...) that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” - Babyfaced guy

Four elements of theater:
1- Theater is LIVE
2- Theater is EPHEMERAL ( ephemeral = fleeting, temporal- like a soap bubble )
3- Theater is SYNTHESIS of other art forms
4- Theater is COLLABORATIVE

———————————————————
———————————————————
09/04
How the audience understands the world of the play:
Audience are essential to plays. If they are no audience, it’s a rehearsal.

How does an audience understand a play:
• Artists — who is performing? What does that mean? How does that mean?
• Artistic heritage — what is like what they are doing? What is the context of the performance?
• What is the style/tone/aesthetic of the piece?

——————————————————————————————————————
09/09
Dramatic Structures:
Buy tickets for “She Kills Monsters”
REGISTER FOR PACKBACK!!!!!
Try to ask GREAT questions to boost up your points

Lecture’s question
• What is the history of dramatic structure?
• What are some models for dramatic structure?
• Why does one particular (Climactic Play Structure) endure?

6 elements of tragedy in Aristotle’s poetics:
• Plot
• Character
• Thought
• Language
• Music
• Spectacle
These elements are distributed by the most important

Aristotle’s Unities
• Time
• Place
• Action
A play must have ALL of these elements

Climactic Structure:
Gustav Freytag
• Compared Ancient Greek tragedies to ideal Germanic drama
• German nationalist
• Invented Freytag Pyramid

Exposition:
Basic information about past events or about the existing state of affairs that is given by the playwright through character conversation

Inciting incident:
An event that occurs near the beginning of the story. This will be a new development in the world of the play. It is something that has never happened before ... and which changes the lives of characters being portrayed in the play.

Rising / Falling action:
The build up and release of tension in the story that is being performed.
Rising Action Intensifies and/or come complicates the central conflict of the story.
Falling Action relaxes us and gives us a moment of respite but it doesn’t drive the story forward.

Climax:
The moment of peak struggle in the central conflict of the play. It is often the final confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist, when one of them wins and the other loses. It is also often the place where we learn the purpose of the late.

Resolution:
The new world of the play, that is, the new circumstances, or the new understanding that has resulted from the actions of the characters.

Climactic Structure is only one kind of dramatic structure:
• Climactic Structure
• Circular Structure
• Episodic Structure
• Serial Structure
• Chance Operation

Climactic plot structure has endured for about 2500 years, i.e., since the age of Classical Greek tragedy.
Why?

Why does Climatic Plot Structure Endure?
• Cosmic: it mirrors the cycle of life as we understand it.
• Cultural/Social: Pursuing and acquiring goals is a key goal of capitalism.
• Emotional: Watching characters face difficulties is satisfying - as long as we know that things will resolve in the end.
• Cognitive: Aristotelian play structure mimics how we acquire language.

——————————————————————————————————————
09/11
Stage Directions:
Instructions from the playwright to the production about movement, stage business, and (sometimes) line delivery.

Topdog/Underdog “Susan-Lori Parks” writer does some unusual, she started writing short plays. She did 365 Plays/365 Days
i.e. “Paper Tomatoes”

Playwrights use stage direction to:
• Describe movement and action
• Inform line readings
• Hint at mood, atmosphere, aesthetics
• Give information, overtly and subtly
• Amuse themselves — and amuse readers of drama
• Orchestrate the production, like Suzan-Lori Parks

——————————————————————————————————————
09/16
Greek Theater
Aristotle did tings

The platonic ideal:
the best example of something.

Catharsis:
purgation of emotions (pity and fear) through watching dramatic action.

Tragedy = tragoedia (Latin)
Tragoedia = goat song

Festival of Dionysus (City Dionysia)
• Religious/national/cultural/commercial festival
• Centered on theoretical competition
• Three days - each day had a trilogy of three plays (tragedies) followed by a short comedy (satyr play)
• Of the hundreds of plays written for the competition, only 33 now exist.

HAMARTIA = “missing the mark”
• Often simplified to mean a tragic flaw, but the term itself comes from Ancient Greek bowmen
• Someone who comes close, but misses. A good person who fails.

Greek Chorus
• All singing, all dancing!
• Represent the community
• Three performances in a row - then they did a physically demanding comedy.

Deus ex machina
“God from the machine”
• an unresolvable plot settled by divine intervention — onstage spectacle for the Greeks, bad writing for us.

“Count no men happy until he is dead.” Oedipus.

——————————————————————————————————————
09/18
Genre: Melodrama

Genre:
The European theatrical tradition has been shaped by the ideas of comedy and tragedy started by Aristotle in The Poetics in the 4th century BCE.

Epic poetry:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.

Homer, The Odyssey

Tragedy (is not epic story)
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration; accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.

Aristotle, The Poetics

Genre is a means of categorizing theatrical works that reflects our worldview, customs, and values, and therefore is not universal.

Tragedy: the subject of tragedy is how we struggle and confront our limitations, the failure of human efforts to overcome our destiny, and the struggle between our desires and necessity of conscience.

Comedy is built on surprise, contrast, incongruity, exaggeration, obsession, slapstick, transgressions, and language.

Melodrama is a popular form marked by simplicity, sensationalism, and sentimentality.
Its production used masterful special effects and played by to working-class audiences.

Aristotle elements of tragedy:
Plot:
plot complex and episodic adventure tale, moving from one crisis to the next.
Character:
• depends on a good man or women being harassed and tormented by villainous forces.
• hero all good, villain all bad
Thought:
Morality: simple and uncomplicated.
Language:
Exciting plot (but not “great” literature).
Music:
Melodrama = drama with music
Spectacle:
The story demanded big scenery and big theaters. (full sized locomotives and horse races on stage, exploding volcanoes, avalanches, etc).

By the end of 19th century, melodrama gives way to Realism.

Melodrama
• two-dimensional characters
• characters are inherently good or evil
• plots are built on coincidences and surprises
• masterful special effects
• working class audiences

Realism
• psychological characters
• characters’ heredity & environment determine their actions
• plots are motivated by character’ desires and needs
• spectacle is based on life
• bourgeois audiences

——————————————————————————————————————
09/23
Mimesis (representation)

Plato said: mimesis is imitation
Aristotle said: mimesis is representation

Book X, The Republic Plato (380 BCE):
“the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth? ”

The Poetics Aristotle (350 BCE):
[Drama] in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure Felton things imitated.

IDEALISM (Plato, Hegel): Our thoughts and ideas shape reality.
MATERIALISM (Aristotle, Marx): Our reality shapes our thoughts and ideas.

Realism:
Why did the genre realism in playwriting emerge in the late 19th century?
What are realism’s legacies?

——————————————————————————————————————
09/25
Realism and Realism’s Legacies

What is realism in theater?
Realism: the representation of a stage world as a believable alternate reality where things happen much as they would in life and people behave in seemingly natural ways.

Legacies of realism:
• intensification of realism
• Naturalism
• Poetic Realism
• Departures from realism
• Futurism
• Symbolism
• Expressionism
• Dada

Naturalism:
A nineteenth-century movement that sought to paint a scientifically accurate stage picture of life as it is lived.

Poetic Realism:
Refers to a way of mirroring reality through the veil of illusion. In other words, it is an attempt for poetic effects of literary art.

Futuristics PISS people off
They LOVE war, love killing and all
Expressionists love feeling

Why did realism take hold in the late 19th century?
• Technologies: photography; lighting; industry.
• wars and revolutions: the French Revolution; 1830 July Revolution; 1848 revolutions.
• prevailing ideas and philosophies: Charles Darwin; (and later) Sigmund Freud
• Chance

What artistic responses did Realism inspire?
• Descending Stars and Turning Around by Edweaard Muybridge
• Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp
• Nude Descending a Staircase by Hannah Harari